


Mortals Be

by Nerissa



Category: Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters (2013)
Genre: Brother-Sister Relationships, Camping, Canon-Typical Violence, Cuddling & Snuggling, Explicit Language, F/M, Gen, Protectiveness, Road Trips, Sexual Content, Sharing a Bed, Sibling Incest, Sibling bond, Team Dynamics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-21
Updated: 2013-12-21
Packaged: 2018-01-05 08:12:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,490
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1091628
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nerissa/pseuds/Nerissa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hansel and Gretel have a lot to work through after they leave Augsburg, like whether or not they should keep Ben around, and how in the world you teach a troll to drink from a cup.</p><p>Good thing it's a long walk to Bremen.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mortals Be

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Angie13](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Angie13/gifts).



As the pyre burned in the town square, Hansel and Gretel packed to leave Augsburg. Their clothes were already stored in tight, neat bundles, ready for first light, but the weapons required extra sorting. While they cleaned, checked and folded down each piece, Hansel crunched the numbers. He double checked his findings just to be sure, because when you were making a case to his sister you’d always got to be sure. Then he gave Gretel a choice: the troll, or the kid.

“We can bring one, but only one. It’d cost too much to feed them both.”

He braced for an argument but Gretel wasn’t looking to fight. She checked the spring on her crossbow, broke it down and said “Edward, of course.”

Honestly, he hadn’t seen that coming. Not that Hansel was any arbiter of male beauty, but he thought most people would probably find Ben easier to look at.

“Why Edward?” he wondered. Then, belatedly, “and why ‘of course’?”

“Because he’ll come in handy. He’s big, strong, and one look at his face will scare the shit out of any dumbfuck sheriff who tries to pull what this one did.” She stowed the crossbow, tight and precise, beside the spare bolts. “That’s why.”

Oh. Of course.

“Okay, so Edward,” Hansel agreed, and as soon as it was settled, he felt good about the choice.

Not that he wasn’t going to do whatever it took to protect Gretel—hell, not like _Gretel_ wouldn’t do whatever it took to protect Gretel—but he saw the wisdom in adding some brawn to their team. The troll was built like an ox with a face like a slab of meat. He could pull the cart, scare the yokels, and Hansel would sleep better knowing there was one more person on the team who had his sister’s back.

Edward was perfect.

Edward seemed kind of happy when they asked him to come along. Not that he smiled or anything, but he bobbed his head, looked to the side and grumbled something that might have been a yes. Gretel acted like the big lug had thrown them a parade. She  was all gracious smiles and sweetness, and Hansel, hanging back, wondered if Edward knew just what a goddamn rarity it was for Gretel to act that way.

Hard to tell how much Edward knew. Edward followed along and took everything in stride. They showed him how to load the cart, he practiced a few times under the dual scrutiny of the siblings, and when they declared he’d got the hang of it, Edward hunkered down beside the cart to sleep. No amount of inviting him to join them in the inn could persuade him to budge.

“I will stay,” he insisted, over and over, until finally Hansel cocked his head at his sister.

“He will stay,” he intoned. He mimicked the troll’s inflection, eyes bulging and jaw slack. Gretel smacked his shoulder.

“Don’t make fun,” she warned, but she smiled too. He smiled back, and all right, they had a guard dog. Hansel could live with that.

The next day Edward was snoring beside the cart, a rumbling mountain of slumbering troll. Their weaponry was unmolested. Hansel had a feeling they could forge their guns out of solid gold and set ‘em with rubies (assuming that wouldn’t be a hellishly expensive and stupid way to make a weapon) and still nobody would reach over Edward to help themselves to the stash.

“Good choice, sis,” he said, and patted her on the back. Gretel, still kind of sleep-tousled and bleary eyed, favoured him with a lazy smile.

“Don’t sound too surprised now,” she murmured, and pecked him lightly on the cheek. “Come on. Let’s get moving.”

Sometimes when they left a town, there was a parade. Other times villagers had chased them with rocks. Hansel was kind of so-so on parades, but he definitely preferred them to an attempted stoning. Thankfully that morning there was neither. As Edward settled himself between the traces of the cart and leaned into the straps for all the world like he really was an ox, Hansel caught Gretel’s eye.

“Not much of a turnout.”

 “Thank God.”

Last time there was a turnout, she almost got burnt. Hansel had never shot so many humans inside of five minutes in his life—he was just lucky Gretel remembered to  grab the moneybag once he cut her down from the stake, or they’d have had nothing to show for that stop but the arterial spray on their clothing.

The morning they left Augsburg he still had a lump his gut over Mina, something that a better-adjusted man would have recognized as grief, but Hansel attributed to rage and a sleepless night on a damp floor. He was pissed at the town that gave her so much less than her due, even after she died to save their kids. In a twisted way he thought he’d almost be glad if the people of Augsburg swarmed at that moment and tried to burn them. He’d have enjoyed shooting a few of those backwater fucks to calm his nerves. But Gretel liked quiet on the way out, so he tried to be grateful.

“Yeah,” he said, “thank God.”

The streets were almost deserted. It might have been due to the hour—the sun was still a good half hour away from breaking the horizon, and everything had that pale grey pre-dawn cast—but Hansel suspected it was more due to _them_. Augsburg was out a mayor, a sheriff and a collection of citizens of varying stripes of moral worth. Only a couple of those deaths were directly their fault, but they had learned the hard way over the years that just because something wasn’t their fault, didn’t mean somebody wouldn’t blame them for it all the same.

“East?” he suggested, as they started down the main road that led out of town in that direction. “Or should we take the north fork?”

Gretel considered their options, the silence punctuated by the creak of the cart and Edward’s damp wheezing.

“North,” she decided, at last. “We don’t have a commission. Maybe we can pick up a few leads in Bremen.”

Hansel cheered up at the thought of Bremen. It would be nearly two weeks’ travel on foot, but a city meant good beds, good food and drink, and sometimes even the luxury of choosing their next bounty. The distance was worth it.

“Bremen’s good,” he decided. “What about it, big guy?” He looked over Gretel’s head to where Edward plodded along, focused on the road. “You ever been to the city?”

Edward grunted.

“You’ll like it,” Hansel promised. “Lots of food. Good parties, great beer. Girls of, uh, how’d you call it, Gretel?”

“Easy virtue.” Gretel smiled around the words, like they tickled her tongue. Hansel grinned too.

“Girls of easy virtue line the streets. You’ll like ‘em, Edward.”

Edward did not appear overly enthused at the idea, but neither did he declaim all interest, so Hansel started to wonder exactly where they might find the guy some female company. Did trolls _like_ female company? He’d never had occasion to wonder. And where would you find a girl who could accommodate the company of a troll?

This new problem so consumed Hansel’s focus, he didn’t notice the usual signs: the slight echo that followed their footsteps and the rustle of bushes in a nonexistent wind. Even the prickling along the back of his neck didn’t alert him to what he normally would have picked up on before they’d even left the city limits. Instead it was Gretel who spun, grabbed the primed and ready flintlock off the side of the cart and aimed it at the road behind them.

“All right,” she said, as Edward stumbled to a halt and Hansel, belatedly, jerked around, “show yourself. I don’t need to see your face to put a bullet between your eyes, so think long and hard before you do something stupid.”

There was a stretch of heavy silence, broken by a wheeze that didn’t come from Edward. Then the bushes rattled and a peculiar lumpy figure staggered out.

For a second Hansel thought it was a witch, then for another moment wondered if it was a troll—a really puny, wizened, geriatric troll.

Then Gretel said “Ben? The _hell_?” and Hansel saw nope, it was just a wheezing kid from Augsburg, bent double under the weight of a pack the size of a billy goat and the strain of trying to trail them undetected.

If Hansel weren’t so keyed up by the lingering tension in his sister’s voice, he might have laughed. Instead he put up an eyebrow and rested the bulk of his weight on one leg, settling in to see how Gretel planned to handle this.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” she hissed, lowering the pistol—but not, Hansel noted, putting it away. Not yet.

“I . . .” Ben teetered, and steadied himself against the cart. “I followed you.”

“No shit.” Gretel still had the pistol in hand. “Were you sent after us? Is it the townspeople? Do they want . . .”

“No, no, they don’t know I’m here.” Ben tilted one way then lunged the other, trying to balance out the weight of his pack. “I came after you. I want to learn—unh, uh, oh!” and he flipped over backwards, the pack dragging him down to the dirt.

Hansel considered the sight of the kid flailing like a beetle on its back. Gretel looked back and caught his eye.

“So . . .” Hansel tipped his head in the direction of the road. “Bremen?”

But no. Gretel helped the kid up, took his pack and slung it into the cart on top of their load. Then she gave Ben that _look_ , the one that made even Hansel check himself sometimes, and the boy wilted.

“Sorry. Sorry, sorry, I’m really .  .  . but you two, you’re the best there is, and there’s nothing back there for me now. I want to be a witch hunter. I’d like to learn from you, but even if I can’t, I don’t think I can stay here.”

Gretel looked over her shoulder at her brother. Hansel shook his head and made an emphatic knifing gesture across his throat. Gretel glared. Hansel threw his hands up in the air and wondered why bother? She’d do whatever the fuck she liked.

“You can come with us to Bremen,” Gretel promised the kid. “But from there, we part company. Understood?”

“Yes, yes, of course it—yes, that’s . . . very kind,” Ben gulped. He looked like a puppy, eyes wet and soulful. Hansel turned away and grunted like Edward. Edward, sensing that the matter had somehow been decided, leaned into the traces once more, and the cart clattered onward, down the road to Bremen.

Hansel, Gretel and a grateful, gibbering Ben fell in step beside it.

“Thank you,” Ben said, over and over. “Thank you, I really do appreciate . . . very generous . . . I know you didn’t have to, very kind of you . . . thank you . . .”

“Ben?” Hansel said, at last. “This is going to work much better if you talk a lot less. And by ‘less’ I mean not at all.”

“Right,” agreed Ben. “Right, yes, sorry. Thank you. Sorry. All right.”

Hansel caught Gretel’s eye. She blinked at him, the image of defiant innocence. Trust Gretel to perfect that look.

Her expression, all studied bewilderment, said _What?_

 _Fuck you,_ said his.

She smiled.

_Later._

Okay, so things could have been worse.

 

***

 

They spent the first night on the side of the road, sheltered from the casual interest of robber bandits and highwaymen by a low hedge of scrubby brush.

Edward took up his self-appointed position on the ground beside the cart. Ben made his bed below the thickest of the brush, though if the sound of his tossing and turning is anything to go by, he didn’t actually do much sleeping.

Gretel curled up in the cart, her head pillowed on the pack of her clothing. Hansel settled down beside her, his head at her feet, his knee resting comfortably just below her ribcage.  She hooked her hand around his leg and he felt the tension bleed out of him at the point where they touched.

Hansel stayed awake for a while, listening to Ben thrash and Edward snore. Gretel’s breathing was softer, masked by the noise of their new companions. She hugged his leg to her chest while she slept and Hansel tracked the depth of her rest by the expansion and contraction of her ribs, the way they pressed against his knee in a steady, floating rhythm.

He pillowed his head on her booted foot, the leather warm under his cheek, and matched his breathing to hers.

_In. Out._

_Out. In._

The rhythm was them. Tangled together, alive, survived. That had always been them.

Their breathing slowed and deepened. Gretel sighed, and Hansel breathed her in. He was still breathing her in when sleep found him, too.

 

***

 

Gretel woke first. Not just the day after Ben joined them, but every day after that. She always woke first. She once told Hansel it was because she didn’t waste her time lying awake at night listening to _him_ breathe, but he just grinned at her, big brother, big fucking pain in her ass, and she knew nothing she could ever say would make him stop doing that, so whatever.

Just cause she was up first didn’t mean she was making their breakfast too. Not that they expected her to—Hansel might have suggested it just to see if she’d smack him, because Hansel liked to wrestle in the morning, but he wouldn’t do that in front of Edward and Ben.

Ben was too scared of them both to even think of questioning the choice of chef, let alone complain about it, and Edward . . . well, Edward caught his own breakfast.

After the first morning, when he sat at the fireside with boar’s blood dripping down his chin into his lap, happily munching his kill, Gretel made him a deal: she’d cook _his_ meals, if he’d bring her the animal first. So Ben and Hansel made lumpy porridge while Gretel and Edward shared his various conquests, roasted over the spit.

The leftover meat was wrapped and parcelled out for lunch each day, Edward caught them something else for supper (Hansel and Ben took turns cooking that) and honestly, it was the best she and her brother had ever eaten when they were on the road.

The food supply, contrary to Hansel’s earlier prediction, was not the problem.

The problem was Ben.

Ben, whose feet were as soft as his chin, and whose lungs weren’t much stronger than his feet because apparently most of his witch hunter training had been spent bent over books in a smoky upstairs room. By the end of the first day his feet were blistered, and by the end of the third day they were bloody. Gretel showed him how to wrap them each night and Ben said it helped, but Gretel suspected he’d rather lie to her than say something he thought might hurt her feelings.

Which was bullshit, because Gretel was pretty sure she didn’t have feelings. Not like that, anyway.

“Tell him,” she ordered Hansel. It was the seventh night and the siblings shared a well-cooked rabbit while Ben lay some distance away, moaning, feet wrapped and elevated to ease the swelling. “Tell him if it’s not working he has to fucking tell me to my face. I keep telling him that and he swears he will, but it’s clearly getting worse, so can _you_ make him own up?”

“Yeah,” said Hansel in a way that meant no, “he’s not gonna listen.”

“Then he’s an idiot.”

“No argument here.”

Gretel sucked the marrow from a tiny bone, considering the problem. He was slowing them down, he was costing them time and money, and she was ready to leave him at the next town they found. But she said he could travel with them, and Gretel wasn’t the kind of person to go back on her word without a good reason.

Maybe she could _ask_ him . . . suggest that the next town might be the best place for Ben to stop his journey, get him to agree with her . . .

“You know he’ll stay behind, if you tell him to.” Hansel spat a bone into his palm, chucked it over his shoulder and reached for the next morsel. Gretel, accustomed to having her brother follow her thought processes, nodded.

“Yeah. I know.”

“He’ll also look so fucking dejected when he says it, you’ll feel like a bitch about the whole thing, and you’ll bring him along anyway.”

Gretel dropped her forehead to her greasy palms with a groan.

“I know.”

“You want me to do it?” Hansel offered around a mouthful of rabbit. Gretel shook her head.

“If you do it I’ll feel like a bitch _and_ a coward, and I’ll probably bring him along anyway. That’s worse.”

She looked over to Ben, who was asleep not so much due to the comfort of his position as the crippling fatigue of punishing his body beyond what it had been trained to endure.

“If there was just some way to make him a little tougher, or make his feet better.”

“Mina prob’ly could have done it,” Hansel reflected. Gretel nodded, then realized that was the first time he’d spoken the woman’s name aloud since they left the town. She hesitated over the knowledge. Hansel, hearing in her silence the question she couldn’t quite ask, answered it anyway.

“I’m fine.”

She studied his profile in the firelight, looking for proof that it was true. His face was grim even in repose, so if you didn’t know him that well—didn’t know him like Gretel knew him—you’d never know for sure. Gretel found even she wasn’t sure, which meant Hansel probably wasn’t sure either.

“Well,” she said, “since Mina’s not here to fix his feet, we’ll have to do what we can. Keep them wrapped . . . maybe he can ride in the cart tomorrow.”

“Yeah.”  Hansel stared into the fire. “Maybe that would help.”

It was far from the most ringing endorsement he’d ever given one of her ideas, but she recognized his distraction and didn’t take it personally. Certainly the next morning when she broached the idea to Ben, Hansel was right there with her, ready to back her up if Ben argued.

Which showed Hansel somehow knew Ben better than she did, because she hadn’t expected it at all, but Ben argued.

“No, I can’t . . . I mean, nobody else is riding. I’ll walk. I’ll be fine.”

“I doubt it,” Gretel frowned, staring at the kid’s feet. Even to argue with her, Ben had to lean slightly against the cart so it could bear the worst of his weight. “Don’t be stupid about this.”

“That’s right. Nobody to impress, here,” Hansel put in. He was standing just behind Gretel’s left shoulder so she couldn’t see his face, but she could picture his expression all the same. It would be the same look that he’d used to keep boys away from her long enough for him to teach his sister how high and hard to kick a boy if needed, and to watch her perfect the art of the head-butt.

Ben was visibly shaken at the sight of it, which meant Hansel hadn’t lost the knack.

Gretel pushed the advantage of the boy’s stunned silence, nodding briskly toward the cart and speaking in a tone that brooked no refusal, unless perhaps Ben would care to experience her many-years-since perfected head-butt.

“If you don’t want to be left in the next ditch you trip into, you’ll get in the cart and shut up about it.”

Ben meekly ascended the cart. Edward, returning from the bushes where he had been dispatched to bury the bones of last night’s supper and this morning’s breakfast, regarded his passenger with a characteristically unreadable expression, then grunted, and shuffled unprotestingly into place between the traces.

“Small man,” he noted. “Soft man.”

It might have been a simple observation, it might have been an indictment of Ben’s weakness, or it might have been the prelude to a suggestion that Ben be their next main course over the campfire. Gretel was still wondering which of those was likeliest when the wagon hit a rut, and Ben’s pack, already displaced by Ben himself, jarred loose and dropped to the road.

“Here,” Hansel hardly missed a beat, turning to stoop and grab at the handle, “hang on to your—”

He broke off. Gretel whipped around, searching the area for whatever threat had silenced her brother, but Hansel wasn’t looking at the woods or the road ahead. He was staring at the ground, and the thing that had fallen from Ben’s pack.

Muriel’s wand.

Gretel was at Hansel’s side in an instant. “The _fuck_?”

Hansel looked up at the cart, where Ben, pale and shaking, hugged his arms around himself as if that meagre gesture might keep the pair from tearing into him.

“Look,” he said, “I know you tossed it on the pyre to destroy it—”

“Oh, oh _good_ , so you know that, do you?” Hansel said, both eyebrows up, eyes wide. Gretel, beside him, narrowed her eyes to slits and advanced on the cart, slow and steady.

“What,” she breathed, “the _hell_ were you thinking, bringing a witch’s wand on the road with us? What the _fuck_ is the matter with you? Never mind that we don’t know what shit that thing is capable of; never mind even that the last bitch who owned it tried to kill us all. I just want you to think, for one _second_ , what anybody who found us with a witch’s wand would do to us.”

The speech drew her abreast of the cart. Ben shrank back, shivering, at the look in her face.

“I’m sorry,” he repeated. The two words cracked in three places.

“You stay here,” Gretel told him. “You and your wand. Maybe somebody takes you in, bully for you. But you can die, for all I care.”

She was ready to heave him out of the cart and dump him in the dirt without a second thought when Hansel stirred behind her. She glanced over her shoulder. Doubt flickered over her brother’s face, and Gretel raised an eyebrow. Hansel shrugged.

Gretel knew that shrug. It meant _your call, sis_ but it also meant he’d be interested in making a different call, if she was willing to listen.

She frowned, but did not pull Ben from the cart. Hansel inclined his head toward the roadside. _Let’s talk._

They cut themselves apart from the other half of their group. Edward showed no inclination to follow them, though he did eye Ben as if anticipating an order to squash his head in. Gretel kept looking back at the cart, considering how nice giving that order would feel, until Hansel touched her upper arm to focus her.

“It doesn’t have to go this way.”

“Like hell it doesn’t. He brought a fucking witch’s fucking wand—”

“That he can’t even use! As far as we could figure out, only _you_ can use it, Gretel.”

Gretel had refused to experiment with the wand after Muriel died. It flared to life in her palm when she lifted it, and her stomach had churned at the odd current of power that had tried to trace its way up her arm. No way was she having anything to do with any witch’s wand. With any witch, period.

“Anybody finds us with that wand, we’ll be lucky to get away with our lives, never mind weapons and the rest. I don’t want him with us.”

“Okay. Okay, so we reach the next town, we leave him there. Come on, Gretel. It was a dumbfuck thing to do, sure. But we don’t leave him by the road. That’s not us.”

Gretel thought she might be ready to make it them, but she agreed to Hansel’s request and they kept walking. Hansel kept the wand, because Gretel refused to touch it but she also refused to give it to Ben. The wand, as she saw it, was everything that they stood against, and that dumbass fawning idiot kid had brought it along.

For one raging moment, she could have killed him for that.

Gretel didn’t actually say the words out loud, but something in her face must have twisted into an expression Hansel, even out of the corner of his eye, recognized from long experience. He spoke without turning his head.

“Don’t.”

“Don’t what?” Her feigned ignorance rang hollow, but Hansel played along.

“Don’t _think_ that way. It’s not who we are, killing humans who don’t try to kill us first. Look, we’ll take him to town, we’ll all spend the night, and tomorrow if you like, you can cut him loose. It’s your choice.”

She fastened her eyes at a distant point in the road, where the smoke and thin spires of the next town rose above the horizon.

 _My choice_.

She held the promise close.

 

***

 

That night they splurged on rooms at the inn. Gretel told Ben he could pay for his own because as far as she was concerned, they were already done with him. Hansel, at her side, settled his favourite blunderbuss across his shoulders to stretch his arms and did not contradict her.

Ben meekly paid for a separate room. Edward chose to stay with the cart, and Hansel and Gretel took one room between them, with two guns apiece.

“You’re not keeping that one in the bed this time,” Gretel warned, eyeing the blunderbuss. “I don’t care if it isn’t loaded. It always gets me in the ribs and I wake up sore.”

Hansel set it to the side without comment. They stripped down to wool and cotton in steady, practiced motions, setting all leather garments neatly to the side to hold their shape for the morning. Gretel unbound her hair and started to attack it with her fingers until Hansel stopped her with a reproving clack of the tongue.

“Talk about sore in the morning,” he muttered, and sat on the edge of the bed. “Stop jerking your neck around like that. C’mere.”

She sat cradled between his legs and tipped her head back into his lap so Hansel could rake his fingers through dark, plait-crimped waves. His hands were callused, but his touch was practiced and gentle. Her hair smoothed and settled under his hand and her scalp relaxed at his touch. She was so road weary, she almost nodded off on the spot.

“There,” he said at last. “Want me to tie it up again?”

“No thanks.” She nudged him aside and crawled up to take the near side of the bed. “Don’t plan on getting it too tangled between now and sun up.”

Which meant _not tonight._

Hansel twisted around to snuff out the candle and Gretel pulled the quilt higher over them both. Then they curled into each other, her hand on his chest, his fingers threaded through her hair, and that would normally be the point where she fell asleep and he listened to her drift off, except . . .

“Gretel, are you sure about this? The kid? He really didn’t mean any harm.”

“The road to hell is paved with dumbfuck kids who didn’t mean any harm. We know that better than most.”

“But we’ve also helped worse kids than him. Remember that first one? Whiny little bitch. If anybody deserved to get left behind and eaten, she did.”

Gretel scowled. “I _wanted_ to leave her behind.”

“And we both know how that would have gone for you, if we hadn’t saved her. That’s what really got us started on all this to begin with.” He snugged his fingers into her hair just enough for her to feel the tug on her scalp. “She’s why we’re here, Gretel. Her witch was the first one we _chose_. Sure, she almost got us killed, but she’s why we’re here. In his own way, so is Ben.”

“It’s not the same.”

“It kind of is.”

“Oh, shut up.”

Hansel shut up, but it didn’t help. She could tell what he was thinking.

She knew he was right, but that didn’t mean she had to like it.

 

***

 

Hansel was third to breakfast the next morning. He found the tavern maid giving a wide berth to the table where Gretel sat with Edward. His sister was trying to teach the troll how to drink from a flagon. Judging by the spatters around the table and the troll’s soaking-wet shirtfront, it wasn’t going well.

“Cheers, big guy,” Hansel offered, toasting Edward with his own drink as he settled in across the table. Edward scowled thoughtfully into his mug, as if trying to work out how to return the salutation. Gretel sighed.

“Trolls don’t really have _lips_ ,” she mused. “It’s a problem. I think he’d do better with a barrel; something wide enough for—” she looked over midsentence, and broke off at the sight of her brother’s face. “What’s wrong?”

Hansel shook his head and knocked back another swig of his morning ale.

“Just dreams.”

Gretel’s expression softened. “Do you want—”

“Nope.” He took another swig. “I do not.”

“All right.”

He looked around, and wondered where Ben was. He could feel Gretel watching him, knew she knew what he was wondering, and could tell from her stony silence that she wanted to discuss Ben about as much as he wanted to discuss the dreams he’d had.

Dreams where Mina, pale and lost, walked away from him on a too-perfect path toward the death that awaited her in front of a rotting candy cottage.

He focused on Edward's schooling. “What if he opened his mouth as wide as he could, and tipped the whole—”

“Why do you think his shirt’s so wet?” Gretel frowned. “His aim is shit.”

“Ah. Well.” Hansel raised his tankard in sympathy. “Keep practicing, big guy.”

Edward looked morosely at his drink.

“We should leave within the hour,” Gretel said, scraping a crust of bread across her plate to sop up the last of the treacle. “I’d like us to make camp before sundown tonight, if we can. The tavern maid said there’s been talk of a coven in the area. Two, maybe three witches all told.”

“Commission?” Hansel asked hopefully. Gretel shook her head.

“She said the town council wants to handle it themselves. Fucking amateurs.”

“Mm,” Hansel reflected, taking another drink of his ale. “Well, y’know, let ‘em. They try, they screw it up, and they’ll be willing to pay more in the end.”

Gretel nodded and pushed her chair back.

“I’ll leave the address of that tavern in Bremen, the one we stayed in last time, in case they change their mind. You think you can be ready to go in an hour?”

“Sure. What about you, Edward?” He glanced over at the troll, who had resorted to dipping his fingers in the flagon and licking them clean of ale. “You got all your beauty treatments packed?”

Edward blinked. Gretel, passing her brother’s seat, thwapped him on the back of the head.

“Don’t tease the troll, Hansel.”

Hansel grinned into his tankard. “Yes, dear.”

By the time it occurred to him to ask what she’d decided about the kid, she’d already disappeared up the stairs.

 

***

 

Edward had already loaded the cart, so Hansel mostly stepped outside to stretch, feel the sun on his face and make sure nothing the troll had packed was being disturbed by too-curious townsfolk. A semicircle of children had gathered around the cart in Edward’s absence, but when Hansel and Edward appeared they scattered like a flock of gulls, regrouping to watch from a distance.

“Hey, kids,” Hansel nodded absently. He poked around in the cart, nodded his approval at Edward’s technique, and rocked back on his heels. “How’s it going?”

The children stared, wide-eyed and close-mouthed.

“Ever see a troll before? Huh?” Hansel jerked his head toward Edward, who stood silently beside the cart. The children did not answer.

“Well, nice talking.” He nodded in their general direction. “Edward, you stay with the cart.”

Edward inclined his head.

“I will stay.”

“Yup, that’s the idea,” Hansel agreed, and started back to the inn. He was almost at the door when he heard a child scream.

He spun around, searching for the source of the sound. None of the kids by the cart looked distressed, so he widened the search, checking the road around the inn, the meadow on the other side of the road, and finally . . .

The wood.

A second scream followed the first, and yes, that one definitely came from the wood.

Running inside to fetch his sister and extra weapons would have cost too much time. A child within hearing distance at this point could be taken in any direction by the time Hansel got back downstairs. So he yelled “Edward! Get Gretel!” and took off, tearing across the road and through the meadow, into the shadows of the forest.

 

***

 

Edward’s interpretation of “get Gretel” involved a more physical retrieval than Hansel had probably intended. It was definitely more physical than Gretel appreciated.

“What the fuck are you doing? Put me _down_!”

Edward quickly set her back on the floor. The boards creaked, but not under Gretel’s weight; the troll had bounded up the stairs, cracked a support beam with his forehead and ploughed into her bedroom like a charging ox. He’d plucked her from the side of the bed where she was tying the last of their packs together, and she had reacted to that as Hansel could have told Edward she’d react, if he’d only known how literally the troll would take his instruction.

Gretel, feet on the ground, didn’t like the sound of all that creaking.

“Go downstairs before you break the floor,” she ordered. Edward turned to obey, just as Ben burst through the door, panting, and waving . . . _what the actual fuck_?

“I heard you scream,” he said, “are you okay?”

 “I’m better than you’re going to be! How in the hell did you get that wand back?”

“H-Hansel,” Ben stammered. “He said . . . he said I couldn’t use it, so it was no danger to anyone as long as I had it. He said to study it, and—and use what I learned for good.”

Okay, that sounded a little like her brother. But that still didn’t explain: “Why did you bring it to my room?”

Ben swallowed, shot an apologetic glance at Edward, and said “You screamed. I figured you could use it, you know, if you were in trouble. Mina used it that time . . .” but he stopped speaking when he saw the murder in Gretel’s face.

“Ben, what Mina did was Mina’s business. Mina wanted to use a wand to save my brother, that’s her concern. Mina wanted to study witchcraft but not use it for cooking little kids, well fine, and God bless us every one. Mina wanted to take off all her clothes and rub her tits in my brother’s face, wonderful! He’s weirdly into that, and I hope they both enjoyed themselves. But I am not Mina, I will never be Mina, so don’t you fucking _dare_ come through my door and point a wand at me, _ever._ You got that?”

Ben, chalk-white, dropped the wand and nodded frantically.

“Good.” Gretel looked back to the troll. “Edward, what’s the matter?”

Edward had been waiting patiently to tell them what exactly was the matter, and he didn’t waste the opportunity given him. In few words he told Gretel exactly what was the matter and finished by pointing a thick finger toward the window to indicate the direction her brother had taken.

“Shit.” Gretel cast a quick eye over the three weapons remaining in the room, then looked down to the wand on the floor. “ _Shit_.”

“We should go after him!” Ben blurted. “I mean, shouldn’t we?” He faltered. “You?”

Gretel looked from Ben to Edward, to the window, then back to the wand.

“Yeah, I should. And I guess you probably will too, since it seems that's what you do now. You don’t have anything more useful than that bitch’s wand, do you? Because we can’t get the whole cart of weapons through those trees across the way, and depending on how long they’ve had him, I’m not sure which guns to take.”

“Well . . .” Ben looked hesitant. Gretel had no patience for the hesitant.

“If you’ve got something, _tell me._ ”

“Right.” Ben disappeared from the doorway. He was back less than a minute later, a cloth-wrapped package in his arms.

“I-I brought the Abramelin Grimoire, too.” He looked like he knew the very confession might seal his fate, and held the book up like a shield. “This isn’t a dark witch’s wand. It’s protection. Against evil. This is good. Right?”

Gretel wasn’t ready to commit to “good” just yet, but she eyed the book with less fury than she had the wand.

“Will it help Hansel?”

Ben nodded. “If _you_ use it, yeah. It will.”

“Right,” Gretel slung her preferred double-strung crossbow onto her back. “Bring it along.”

“What, the book?”

Gretel did not look at Ben, Edward, or the wand when she answered.

“All of it.”

 

***

 

So, it was a witch. That was no shock. Hansel had expected a witch, especially after what Gretel had told him in the tavern. He should have expected a coven for the same reason, except in his haste to follow the child’s screams, he’d kind of forgotten his sister’s exact words.

Turned out, there were three of them. Three witches was a lot, no matter how experienced you were, and these three had taken him like he wasn’t even half as experienced as he really was.

Not that he had much time for a bruised ego, with the witches getting him cornered and pinned under the most enormous fucking tree trunk he’d ever seen. Just one smoky red _zzzpt_ of a wand and the whole tree had split in two, creaked, and crashed down on him. It would have crushed him flat but he dove to one side, pressing into the shadow of a big rock, and that kept him alive. His ribs were screaming, he couldn’t move an inch, but he was alive.

For now.

He bet they’d go for the kid first. She was maybe five or six—he’d never been good at the guessing-ages thing—and they already had her trussed up like a Christmas goose on a spit, hanging over a blackened fire pit. She was still screaming, poor tyke. Like it would help now.

He turned his head in an effort to get a better look at the setup, and saw charred bones littering the ground around the pit. Small ones.

He hoped Edward would bring Gretel sooner than later. Otherwise, they were pretty well fucked.

 

***

 

“This . . . isn’t so bad,” Ben observed, as they trekked through the woods.”It’s kind of pretty. My feet even feel better.”

“That’s the magic,” said Gretel, without turning around. “The witches charm the paths sometimes in order to lure people down them. Usually it’s meant for kids lost in the woods, so you get the kind of paths that would appeal to kids. They're wide and flat, sometimes with flowers and chipmunks along the sides. Walking on them can also affect your mood if witch magic works on you. People we’ve talked to say walking down the path toward the witch’s lair makes you feel less tired and discouraged. The second you turn around, all that goes away.”

“Oh,” said Ben. He paused. “Is it weird that I find that clever? Because it’s pretty clever, I think.”

“Yeah.” Gretel said in a monotone. “It’s real clever, Ben.”

Ben didn’t appear the least bit daunted by Gretel’s deadpan reply. He actually started to whistle a cheery little tune.

“I’ve got a great feeling about this,” he assured Gretel and Edward. “Really, I think we’re going to handle it just fine.”

Gretel nodded, grimly satisfied.

“We’re getting close.”

 

***

 

The tree fucking hurt. After a while, Hansel couldn’t focus on anything but that. His head hurt too, from where he’d hit it against a rock, and maybe he was bleeding more than he’d first thought. That probably wasn’t a good thing.

Breathing was starting to hurt, too.

Maybe it would be easier if the breathing stopped.

Dazed, not exactly thinking straight, he tried to hold his breath to make breathing not hurt anymore. It sort of worked, in the sense that as long as he held his breath, it only hurt in certain spots. But eventually he had to breathe again and then it hurt all over.

He was about to curse breathing (which, if he’d thought it through, he would have realized took more breath than just lying there under his tree) when he heard one of the witches scream a warning. It was the last sound she made—a big, meaty troll-hand shot out and ripped her head from her shoulders before she could make another.

The second witch stumbled back to dodge Edward and fell into the fire they’d just lit for the kid, so that was the end of _her_. It was nice when they did the work for you like that, though Hansel did hate the smell of cooking witch.

The third witch ran toward him. He thought, in some distant pain-fogged region of his brain, that was weird. Why him? Though to be fair, it wasn’t clear if she was deliberately aiming for him or just happened to be fleeing in his general direction . . . but Gretel didn’t wait to find out.

Blue lightning cracked across the clearing, split the bitch in two, and that was the end of her.

Hansel’s world spun sickeningly around him, which made no sense, because wasn’t he lying down? He heard Gretel giving orders from very far off, so that was okay, because Gretel was there . . . everything was always okay, as long as Gretel was there.

Supremely comforted, Hansel passed out.

 

***

 

“Is he dead? Shit, Hansel, you can't be dead or I'll kill you. Edward, get this thing off him.”

Edward gripped the trunk in both hands and, with a ground-shaking roar, flipped it off Hansel. Hansel, one giant mess of hurt by that point, groaned. Gretel couldn’t even tell if the sound was one of relief or from pain at some other injury, but it didn’t even matter: he was _alive_.

“Hansel,” she dropped to his side. “Hansel, can you—shit, this does not look good.”

 _This_ was a trickling head wound, but on further examination it could also have been the dislocated shoulder and the way pretty much every rib was, very probably, broken.

“Oh God,” Gretel whispered. “Oh fuck, Hansel, what were you fucking thinking?”

He shook his head, barely conscious but still offended at having his judgement called into question.

“Wha’ th’fuck makes you think I even _was_?” he mumbled. “Leave all the thinkin’ to you, smarty-pants. Smartass. Pain in my ass.”

Gretel bit back a thin laugh and looked down the length of him.

“You’re in bad shape.”

“You’re no prize yourself.”

She wished that him snarking at her was proof he was okay, but Hansel would probably snark at her with his dying breath.

“Breathe, okay? Just lie there and breathe. Smell the fresh air.”

“Done with fresh air for today,” Hansel mumbled. “Fuckin’ fresh air. Oughta  . . . oughta be shot. Shoot the fresh air.”

“If we see any,” Gretel soothed, “we’ll do that. But you need to be still now, okay? We can’t move you. There’s so much wrong .”

“The kid?” he wondered.

“Ben? He’s here.”

“No, not—” Hansel tried to say, to explain he meant the little girl, but Gretel wasn’t paying attention. She had an idea.

“Ben?” Her voice was strong; sure. “Bring that book over here.”

Ben galloped over, the little girl trotting at his heels like a puppy who had found her favourite person in the whole world and wasn’t about to let him out of her sight.

“The Grimoire?”

 “Yes. Put it just here.” She leaned over the pages, flipping rapidly through until she found what looked—okay, if she was being honest, what _felt_ —like the right page. Then she put one hand on Hansel, the other hand on the pages, and carefully, clumsily, spoke the words.

The power in the world below her was like nothing she’d ever felt. It made her dizzy to tap into it, and for just a second she could see why this was something that you got hooked on. Then she steadied, found her balance, and felt Hansel’s heart beating under her hand. She saw where things were wrong inside him, she pulled the magic from underneath and made her brother well.

Then, because she had the book open, and why the hell not, she hardened the road-torn flesh on the soles of Ben’s feet. Because she wanted to, and he’d saved her brother’s life with his dumbfuck wand and his stupid magic book, and so there, that’s why.

And because . . . _Hansel_.

Gretel never needed more reason than that.

 

***

 

Hansel woke the next morning to find his sister in bed beside him, her head propped up on her hand, watching him sleep.

“Creepy when you do that,” he mumbled. Her lips curled at one corner, and that was her most weary smile, so she probably hadn’t woke before him: she’d just never slept in the first place.

“Creepier when you do,” she returned, and stroked his cheek. “God you need a shave.”

“I’ll get right on that,” he promised, and she laughed, so that was good. “What happened?”

“What do you remember?”

He remembered most of it. She filled in a couple gaps, like how they all got back to the tavern, but the rest of it was stuff he hadn’t known to begin with, like how she’d used Muriel’s wand, and the fact that the very grateful townspeople had raised a reasonable reward for the four of them.

“Should keep us nicely all the way to Bremen,” she concluded.

He stared at her. Her eyes edged away, checking the beams over their heads.

“Gretel . . .”

“No. Forget it. It’s nothing.”

“But you used _magic_.”

“All right!” the cry ripped out of her, all angry, frightened defiance. “All right, so hate me if you want, but when I thought you were in trouble, I didn’t even care. I still don’t care. I’d do it all over again, exactly the same, so fuck you, I don’t care what you think. I’m glad I did.”

He would have laughed if his ribs didn’t hurt like hell. Instead he reached for her hand.

“Fuck you,” he said fondly, “for thinking I’d care. Shit, Gretel, whatever you want to do—I figure that’s fine by me. It always has been. You do what you think you have to do, and it is always gonna be fine by me. Got it?”

She nodded. “Got it.”

“Good.” He tugged on her hand, and she understood what he wanted; settled in as close as she could without nudging his ribs, and pressed her face to his chest. He buried his nose in her hair, and finally, painfully, sighed.

They lay like that for who knew how long, as the sun came up and the town bustled to life beyond their window. Then,

“Ben was there, right? I didn’t just hallucinate that?”

She nodded, bumping his chin with her head.

“Ben was there. He’s coming with us to Bremen after all. And . . . he’s staying with us after that. If he wants. I asked him to, and I think he’ll say yes.”

“Of course he will. Kid’s so fucking in love with you, it’s embarrassing. I know a little something about that. But you don’t have to ask him along just because—”

“He saved your life.”

“He did. But if you’re still uncomfortable, I don’t want you to decide based on—”

“Hansel.” She cut him off mid-platitude. “He _saved_ your _life_.”

Hansel understood. For the same reason he’d recognized the merit in Edward coming along, Gretel wanted to bring Ben.

“Your call, sis,” he said. “You know that. It’s always been your call.”

Gretel pulled back from his chest just far enough to smile up at him from an angle he could see.

“The kid stays.”

“Okay. He stays.”

 

***

 

As the day wore on, Hansel progressed from the bed to the washbasin, to a table downstairs where he ate everything set in front of him and was bought a pint by what felt like everyone in the village. Then he walked back up to bed under his own power, though Gretel followed close behind.

“You’re sure,” she started to say, for the umpteenth time.

“I’m sure,” he promised. “Really, I feel pretty fantastic, considering. Whatever you did, it worked. I’m almost good as new.”

He knew she didn’t doubt his word so much as she doubted her own ability to have made that true. But something in his assurances must have convinced her, because this time as she settled between his knees so he could comb out her hair, she said “and tie it up tonight, okay?“

He still took his time, working every strand, dark silk rippling across his fingers as he enjoyed the knowledge that he was here, alive, to hold her. When at last the curtain of her hair lay smooth and shining across his lap, he divided it into three equal parts, painstakingly wove them back together, snug, unbreakable, and bound the plait with a short length of cord.

“Feel okay?” he asked, leaning forward to press a kiss to the top of her head.

“Perfect.”

“Good. Now get up here already.” He hauled her up onto the bed by her arm, relishing the simple fact of her laughter as she tumbled down on top of him.

“Bully,” she accused, smiling, and rolled off to snuggle in beside him. “So fucking bossy when you’ve almost been killed. I hate that.”

“Hey, you want to blame somebody, you should blame Ben,” Hansel protested. “If it weren’t for him, I wouldn’t even be here to order you around.”

But it was too soon to make that joke. He knew almost the moment he said it, and saw the flash of pain, of real terror, that split her face. He wrapped an arm around her shoulders, guilt-ridden.

“Sorry,” he said, “honey, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have . . . but there,” he tried to strike a better, more teasing note, “aren’t you glad we brought him after all? I know I am.”

“Don’t gloat,” she mumbled, and rooted her face into the crook of his neck, breathing him deep. “And fuck you, I was the first one who said we should bring him anyway.”

“Aw come on, don’t take this from me. You’re right so often, I never get to gloat.” But he stopped talking anyway, and she sighed. The gust of breath tickled his neck. He lowered his head, touching his forehead to her chin, so he felt the exact moment her mood shifted. No longer frightened or even mildly irritated, she was ready to poke back.

“You know,” she said, deliberately casual, “Ben had a painting of me. Back in Augsburg.”

It took Hansel a moment to figure out what she meant. “You mean, in that creepy book? Yeah, he had a lot of—”

“No. Not the clippings. I mean, a real painting. I think he did it himself. It was hanging on the wall above his pillow.”

Hansel went very still.

“His pillow . . . in bed?”

She nodded, her chin bobbing on his head. He swallowed hard, and counted to five.

“Well. Uh. He must be something of an artist, huh?”

She smiled and nuzzled the top of his head.

“I don’t think he painted it out of any artistic aspirations in particular.”

Hansel choked on his own exhalation. Gretel cradled his jaw in her palms, drawing his face to the soft curve where her throat met her breastbone. He _knew_ she was smiling.

“Come on, you can’t begrudge the guy his private time, can you?” She tipped her head up as he pressed his lips to the base of her throat, sighing softly into the silence of the room. “Not when you get to have the real thing.”

“Guess not,” he said huskily, and trailed kisses below the neckline of her chemise until Gretel was gasping and moving in a way that made speech more trouble than it was worth.

Let Ben have his painting. Gretel’s pulse beat under Hansel’s lips, her skin dewed with the sweat of her own arousal, and the keening little cries she made as he tasted her were like a song without music.

A painting could never make sounds like that.

Poor kid.

 

***

 

That should have been the end of it, as far as Hansel was concerned, but there were still the dreams. He felt he deserved them, somehow, but trust his sister to disagree.

The same nightmare woke him just before dawn. He lurched up in bed still tangled in the sheets, Mina’s name on his lips. Gretel woke in the same instant and her hand locked around his, grounding him in the truth of the room, of their bed, and her presence in it.

“Hansel.” She waited a beat. “You awake?”

He nodded, dragged his palm over his eyes and counted the beats of his heart until the numbers dropped to something more ordinary.

“Yeah. That . . . fuck.”

She watched his face in the moonlight, waiting for the moment when he was wholly returned to himself. Then,

“Tell me what she does. In your dream.”

He wanted to refuse, like usual, but . . . she’d cast a fucking spell to save his life. Knowing Gretel, that had _cost_ her. He owed her this much. He shook his head, the simplicity of the truth somehow making it worse.

“Nothing. She just . . . nothing. She just turns and walks away. Every time. I call her, I _know_ what’s going to happen, and she goes to the cottage anyway. She goes away to die.”

Gretel blinked.

“Well, of course she does.”

 He looked down at her, uncomprehending. She sighed and rested her cheek on her free hand, giving him that same old _you big dumb fuck_ expression he’d seen innumerable times over the years.

“Hansel. You _liked_ her, right?”

He wasn’t sure that was the kind of question he was supposed to answer. There’d been girls he’d _wanted_ over the years, and Gretel had never minded them. But she’d also never asked if he liked any of them, because . . . well, because she already knew.

He got the feeling she knew this time, too.

“Yeah. Yeah, I . . . she . . .” He sighed. “I did.”

“Well, there you go.” She squeezed his hand reassuringly. “The kind of girl you’d _like_ wouldn’t turn and run away from that place. It wouldn’t matter if she knew what was going to happen or not. She’d go running into it and fight with you anyway. If she wouldn’t . . . well, she wouldn’t be the kind of girl you’d like.”

It was late and it was dark and he was still sort of breathing too hard from the dream and everything that had happened to his ribs, so it took him a minute to follow her reasoning. But once he had . . . yeah. Somehow, that made perfect sense.

Mina kept walking toward that cottage because Mina would have walked toward that cottage no matter what. Every time. That’s the choice she would have made.

He flopped back against the pillow, and Gretel curled herself, petal-soft, steel-cored, against his side.

“Ready to go back to sleep now?” she murmured. He fit her into the curve of his arm and pulled her close.

“Yeah. I am.”

 

 

 

***

 

The next morning, as Hansel tied the last pack in place on the cart, he asked Gretel if they were going to add Edward and Ben to their advertising leaflets. She said no fucking way.

“Those things cost a fortune to print,” Gretel scoffed. “They want a credit on our posters, they’ll have to pay for it themselves.”

“Fair enough,” said Hansel. He slung the blunderbuss over his right shoulder and his left arm around his sister. “So . . . Bremen?”

She nodded, and rested her head on his shoulder just long enough to warm his arm through his sleeve.

“Bremen.”

“Right. Hey, Kid! Big guy!” He swung the gun casually through the air, like a rallying gesture. “Move out.”

Edward leaned into the traces. Ben, wearing new boots and thick socks, buried his nose in the Abramelin Grimoire and trotted along behind, following the sound of the squeaking wheels.

Hansel and Gretel fell into step beside them, shoulder to shoulder, and all four started down the road to Bremen.

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Yuletide, recipient! I must admit I had a lot of fun with these four, and I hope that you did too.


End file.
